5 Times Tosh Almost Caused the End of the World & One Time She Didn't
by Heart Full of Elves
Summary: Exactly what it says on the tin.


**I.**

All teenagers go through a rebellious phase, and Toshiko Sato is no exception. As a teen in the early 90s, she is impressed and awed by the introduction and growing popularity of personal computers. Her parents save up and finally buy one, and from the moment she first sets eye on the new Commodore 64, she is entranced. The keyboard calls to her, and her fingers just itch to be allowed to work the computer and see what it can do. That's where the problem starts, really.

Toshiko rebels by becoming her high school's first computer nerd. At first she declines the odd invitation here and there to hang out with friends because she'd rather learn every single function of her parents' computer, but eventually she begins to lose interest in friends altogether. Her dad is worried that she's becoming a hermit, preferring to stay in her room all day, but her mum reminds him that they were once antisocial teenagers too, and she'll grow out of this phase by the time she goes to university.

She reads manuals, books about computer coding, anything she can get her hands on that will help her master this machine. She loses sleep, she puts on weight, and she has to get glasses with horrible, bulky frames, but she doesn't care. As long as she's sitting at the computer, she's content. Sleep, exercise, and social activities are forgotten. Coding, hacking, and creating programmes from scratch take their place.

Toshiko is nearly nineteen when it happens. From consulting her books and comparing notes with other students in her computer science class, she manages to create something totally new to her, and not completely by accident, either. What she's created can be shared via floppy disc to other computers and wreak havoc on their systems. (She and her mates got drunk one night and thought it would be fun to play with people, knowing that their computers are breaking and unable to fix it, not knowing why or what is happening. It wasn't the brightest of ideas, but it stuck, and she drew the short straw, meaning that she was the one to make it.)

She doesn't know that the bit of code one of her friends gave her means the programme will not just spread to a few select personal computers, but to every computer on the planet, and it will wipe every hard drive and corrupt every operating system while it's at it.

It's only the power in her flat shutting off because they forgot to pay the electricity bill that puts an end to it. She hasn't saved what she's doing, hasn't yet bought the floppy discs to burn the programme onto, and the whole thing gets deleted. Toshiko throws a plate at the wall and it shatters: a waste, just like her project was.

When she informs her friends of her failure, she thinks that maybe it was for the best. She's just a student; she doesn't know what she's doing. For all she knows, she could have unleashed something that would ruin people's lives by destroying their precious machines.

She never writes a computer virus just for fun ever again.

**II.**

She's well and truly settled into her new job as technician at Torchwood Three when she almost causes the end of the world again. She's doing what she loves, she's safe (well, compared to how she was before she joined the alien-catching organisation) and she enjoys working with Jack and Suzie. She thinks she likes Owen, too, when he starts a year after she does, even though he can be a bit of a wanker at times. She excuses his rudeness because she knows that, like her, he's young, and broken for some reason or another – he must be, to work at Torchwood.

He hasn't been with them long when New Year's Eve rolls around, and because he's new to the city, Tosh takes pity on him and invites him to go out with her and Suzie. When midnight strikes, Suzie kisses Owen on the mouth, and Tosh would feel jealous, except that the other woman leaves after that. She breathes a sigh of relief, not seeing the note Suzie left in Owen's jacket pocket. Tosh and Owen go back to her flat, just because. There's no apparent rhyme or reason for it, and they have a couple of drinks before passing out on the sofa.

When she wakes up, she has a crick in her neck and Owen's head is in her lap. She thinks she can feel drool seeping into her jeans. She eases herself up off the couch, gently so as not to wake him, and pads to the bathroom to freshen up before heading into the kitchen to make breakfast. She's standing at the bench in front of the toaster, waiting for it to brown her bread, when she hears a loud and slightly obnoxious voice yell out, "Where the fuck…?!"

The sudden noise startles her, and her arm goes flying out and knocks something off the shelf and into the toaster. As soon as she realises that it's the small alien bomb they found the other day, the one that will release toxic gas into the atmosphere if it reaches a certain temperature (and yes, she knows it should never have left the hub, but she thought she could work on dismantling it at home) she grabs the nearest object and sticks it into the toaster, hoping to get the device out before it explodes. She manages that, but it just so happens that the object turns out to be a knife, and she screams as electricity runs through her before she collapses to the floor.

Owen revives her with CPR, and even though he has the most awful morning breath, she thinks getting electrocuted was worth it, if it means she gets to kind of kiss him. When he helps her up and asks if she's okay, she nods dumbly, staring at him.

After she's calmed down and her heartbeat's back to normal, she says, "Thanks for saving my life," and is sincere.

That's the day she falls in love with Owen Harper.

It becomes tradition after that for the two of them to spend New Year's Eve together, and the "toaster incident" becomes their inside joke for the next few years.

**III.**

Tosh doesn't approve of the newest addition to the team, not at first. Ianto Jones is a survivor of the Battle of Canary Wharf, an ex-Torchwood One employee, and therefore likely to be suffering from PTSD but not showing any outward signs that he is, and she can't work him out. She can't tell what his job is, except for making the best coffee she's ever tasted (it's been two weeks and already she's hooked). And she has no idea why Jack would recruit him, as Jack hates anything related to Torchwood London, and Ianto seems to like comparing the two galaxies-apart branches of the organisation whenever he gets a chance. Ianto is a puzzle, an enigma, but she suspects it will take a lot of time and effort for her to break the code.

She loses interest after the third week, when he declines her offer for the third time to go out for drinks with her and the others after work on Friday.

(Later, she realises that was his intention, and wishes she hadn't given up on him. Later still, she tries again to win his friendship, and has a small measure of success.)

Tosh is out in the field with Jack, Owen, and Suzie, the four of them searching for organic material that fell through the Rift in the woods, when she gets a bad feeling in the back of her mind. She knows she's just being silly, but the feeling that something bad is about to happen grows in strength, the urge to run away increasing. It's getting dark, and she doesn't want to still be in the woods when night falls.

Her scanner makes a weird sound, and her heart sinks when it tells her that the battery's about to die. She hits the stupid device against the nearest tree, hoping a hard knock will give it some life, though as a technician she knows it won't. The scanner creates a hole in the tree trunk and –

_Fuck_, she thinks. Because it's not a tree trunk, it's a hive.

Only the insects that fly out aren't like any she's seen on Earth. These bees, wasps, whatever the hell they are, are mauve (the universal colour for danger, she notes absently) and fucking ginormous, as Owen would say. And when the insects' threatening buzzing sends the rest of the team running to discover the source of the sound, that's exactly what he says.

Jack and Owen immediately reach for their guns and begin shooting, instincts but not intelligence kicking in. Tosh just stands there, motionless. This is all her doing, and she should have known better than to throw an expensive piece of equipment around the way she did.

"Are you insane?" Suzie screams. "You can't shoot fucking _bees_!"

The woman's right, Tosh acknowledges with reluctance. (Tosh doesn't like it when Suzie's right. The woman's already sleeping with Owen – does she have to be clever as well as attractive?) Pumping bullets at flying insects is not going to work and, looking at her male colleagues' lack of success, proving to be ineffective. Thinking and coming up with a quick and easy solution, she opens the kit that Suzie was smart enough to get out of the SUV, and rummages through it. In the fading sunlight, it takes her a while to find what she's looking for, but eventually she pulls out a can of fly spray.

To everyone's relief, the fly spray works, and the alien insects drop to the ground, dead, although some of their legs still move a little. Jack orders Owen to take samples back to the hub so they can see just what the aliens are this time ("killer bees" is Owen's expert analysis the next day) and then turns to Tosh and lays a hand on her shoulder.

"Good job," he tells her, and for once she agrees with his praise. Even if it _was_ all her fault, she quickly solved the problem, and with a complete lack of casualties too. She lets him be proud of her, just this one time.

Telling Ianto that they went through an entire can of fly spray proves difficult though.

**IV.**

Suzie kills herself, Gwen replaces her, and Ianto's dark secret is out before Tosh almost causes the end of the world for the fourth time. This time is different – this time she knows what's at stake. But somehow she lets herself be manipulated, walking right into Mary's trap.

The pendant is frightening at first – being able to read people's thoughts isn't something that happens every day, and knowing everything that people are thinking is unnatural. When she was a young girl, she sometimes wished she could read people's thoughts, and now she thinks she should have been careful what she wished for.

Then the pendant is a gift – she saves a family from being murdered, and sees that it can be used for good. But in the end she sees it for what it really is: a curse. Because of the pendant, she has kept secrets from her friends, and she hates the dishonesty. Because of the pendant, she knows what the people she works with really think, even if they're not aware of these thoughts, and she feels dirty for invading their privacy like this.

While Mary holds a knife to her throat, Tosh finally sees the extent of her girlfriend's manipulation. Mary lied about everything, luring her in with a pretty piece of jewellery so that she could get back to her transporter and get home. An alien going home and leaving the planet alone doesn't sound so bad, but the chances that Mary's people will all come to Earth are too great – Torchwood deals with threats of alien invasion every other week, and can't risk it.

Tosh finds it hard to breathe – Mary's almost choking her, and her friends' panicked thoughts are overwhelming. Jack tells her to focus on his voice and do as he says, and she obeys, trembling and struggling for air. She's caused this by being the fly in Mary's web, allowing the woman power over her and bringing Mary into their secret base. What the hell can she possibly do to fix it?

It's Jack who ends it this time.

He sends Mary into the sun to die. Tosh grieves for her girlfriend, wishing that things had been different. If Mary had been human, they could have had something. She'd never been attracted to a woman before, but Mary was so full of life that Tosh was captivated. She could have fallen in love, if only they'd had more time. It's not fair.

But then, life at Torchwood never is.

**V.**

After spending most of a night stuck in 1941 with both Jack Harknesses, Tosh is determined to make the most of her life here in the present. Getting a glimpse of what life was like nearly seventy years ago was educational, but she belongs in the 21st Century. She doesn't plan on travelling through time again anytime soon, accidental or not.

It's not long after things have returned to normal before chaos reigns. The Rift is going haywire, people and objects and diseases from other times – past and future – coming through it and ending up here, all over the Earth in 2008.

Opening the Rift is the only way to fix it. Things will go back to where they came from, and the world will go back to how it was. Tosh doesn't even consider the idea that it could be a trick. She saw her mother, and her mother would never lie to her. They must open the Rift.

So she stands beside Owen, Gwen, and Ianto against their leader, their captain. He taunts them, calling them a united front and telling them not to do it, but this only angers them even more, and Tosh and the team's determination increases.

They open the Rift.

They don't know the extent of what they've done until it's too late. Tosh feels responsible for the destruction they've caused – the release of Abaddon and the terrible consequences that arise from that. (How can she not? People died, and even though time was reset, it never should have happened in the first place.) She should have listened to Jack – was he ever wrong? Did he ever let her down? She owed him her loyalty.

But now he's lying in the morgue, having sacrificed his life to save the lives of every being on Earth, and Gwen won't leave his side, going on with this delusional idea of hers that he will wake up, even though he's dead. And Tosh knows that she and the team are to blame for this tragedy. Gwen won't sleep or eat, and Owen's being uncharacteristically quiet. Even Ianto seems a little mopey, and she knows how good he is at hiding his emotions, so Jack's death must have hit him harder than one would guess. Torchwood's world has ended.

Tosh grieves in private, but tries to stay strong. Out of all of them, she knew Jack the longest, but knows he wouldn't want her to mourn him forever, so she puts on a brave face and gets on with it. It's what he would do if their fates were swapped, after all.

She's always believed in him, but unlike Gwen, she doesn't expect one more miracle from him. Abaddon sucked the life out of him – there's none left. Of course she wishes Gwen were right, but she knows that Jack's ice-cold body means he won't ever open his lively blue eyes again.

So when he does, she runs as fast as she can to hug him and make sure he's really alive. He's given them this miracle, and if it's the last thing he ever gives them, she won't complain.

Because he's saved her so many times in the past that she wants to return the favour.

**VI.**

In Toshiko Sato's last moments, she _saves_ the world. To be exact, she talks Owen, the man she loves, through preventing a nuclear meltdown. It's a hero's death, and she's glad she isn't dying because of an embarrassing accident. (A repeat of the toaster incident really isn't how she ever wanted to go.) No, she was shot by Gray, her beloved captain's little brother, and as she sits on the floor of Owen's workspace, barely able to hold herself up, the life drains out of her along with her blood.

She's dying while saving the world, and it isn't a bad way to go, really. Sure, she would have liked to live a little longer, but working for Torchwood was always going to kill her eventually, she never had any illusions about that. She just wishes that someone were here to hold her as she slips out of this life and into the darkness that awaits, and she wishes that someone were Owen. But he's dying too – in a minute the radiation's going to tear his cells apart, and this time he'll be dead for good.

When Owen reminds her over the comms that they never got their date and tells her that they just sort of missed each other, she knows he loves her, and it's enough, even if it's not the same kind of love she has for him. That they worked together, spent time together, and are now dying together is enough. It's too late to wish that they could have had a future. It's too late for could-have-beens.

They always had each other's backs, her and Owen. They were friends, part of the Torchwood family, and she doesn't regret a single moment of it.

Their deaths won't be for nothing, and it's fitting that they should die this way – at the same time and while talking to each other, and yet separated by distance.

From the moment she was shot, her life was pretty much over, and by the time Jack and Gwen show up, it's much too late to save her. She's too weak to say anything, but she looks at the man who saved her and gives him one last smile.

She doubts anyone other than Jack, Gwen, and Ianto – the three of them what's left of Torchwood without her and Owen – will ever know the truth about her death, but she can't think about that now. She wishes she could voice her dying thought, but it's too late.

As the light goes out of her eyes and her last breath escapes her body, she thinks, _I hope I did good._


End file.
